Lee Marvin: Blank Point of His Career

No sooner had Lee Marvin gained Oscar status and international stardom with Cat Ballou (1965) and The Dirty Dozen (1967), his career began to slide.  He subsequently made two personal films with director John Boorman: Point Blank (1967) and Hell in the Pacific (1968), which use Marvin's movie persona and his war experience to forge exceptional dramas.  Marvin had the clout to make such films.

After fifteen years as a supporting actor, Lee Marvin hoisted himself to the ranks of superstar, a term invented in the 1960’s when being a "star" didn’t mean as much.  From 1967 to 1971 Marvin ranked 2, 9, 7, 7, 10 in the theater owners' poll of most popular stars.  Even during this time, and especially after, Marvin appeared in a series of weak pictures which were impervious to his best performance to lift them to popularity or a decent aesthetic level.

No movie epitomized the trap of Marvin’s superstardom than Paint Your Wagon (1969). In fact, the movie would become the “point blank” of his inability to sustain this stardom.    

Two very successful Broadway shows from the Sixties were forced upon a disinterested moviegoing public.  Both represented, in their singularly diverse ways, familiar if broadly mythologized and misguided aspects of the 1960s.

Hair was a commonplace exploitation of the hippie movement and Vietnam War protests; Paint Your Wagon incorporated within its general plot the sexual liberation binges of the era whence husbands and wives, as well as the unmarried, swapped and shared partners.  A free-and-easy morality swirls through both musicals, but too much sex is the least of these movies’ drawbacks.

Paint Your Wagon is virtually unwatchable because of the cast.  Marvin, Clint Eastwood, and Jean Seberg drew me into the proceedings at the No Name City mining camp.  But notice that the producer brought two successful “actors”; unfortunately, their repertoire did not include singing (Honkeytonk Man hasn’t dispelled this fact for Eastwood), a not-so-small oversight given that one of the largest film budgets of the time was lavished on the production.

An oversight?  Maybe not.  Just the willful calculation of bean counters who, in the end, deserved to be stuck with this incredibly uneatable turkey.  And Eastwood insisted on singing!  Nobody had the courage, foresight, common sense to perform voiceovers as in My Fair Lady and Camelot.  At least -- and this may be a variation of France’s love affair with Jerry Lewis’ humor -- Lee Marvin recorded and secured a hit record in England (“Wandrin’ Star”) from the film.

Paint Your Wagon’s plot could barely titillate veteran movie watchers or match either Marvin’s palimony case or Eastwood’s ditching of Sondra Locke for drama.  This musical Jules et Jim, a frontier Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, strained believability when it shouldn’t have.  One’s basic feeling is to root for Seberg to leave both men -- putting up with their singing would have been grounds for a battering case.

We must return, again, to the Musical as “star vehicle”: transparently capitalizing on the presence of two megastars in the worst possible vehicle imaginable for them.  A Marvin-Eastwood musical challenges all sanity.  One could more easily accept a Charles Bronson-Chuck Norris version of Julius Caesar.

The film, directed by Joshua Logan, would be the biggest production with which Marvin was to be associated. It cost about $18,000,000 and his salary was one million dollars.  The film was given "roadshow" treatment:  presented originally as a reserved seat production at selected urban theaters.  Ed Sullivan discussed its making on his Sunday night show, having visited the set on October 5, 1969.

Marvin grew a beard for the role and oft quoted was director Joshua Logan: "Not since Attila the Hun swept across Europe leaving 500 years of total blackness has there ever been a man like Lee Marvin."  The best song ("They Call the Wind Moriah") went to a real singer, Harve Presnell.  Variety pinpointed the greatest problem:  "a muddled script -- actually lack of a compelling story."

For the second time in a row Marvin was paired with a superstar (first time: Toshiro Mifune in Hell in the Pacific), Clint Eastwood, with equally disappointing box office results.  The other three roadshows that year (Goodbye, Mr. Chips; Sweet Charity; Hello, Dolly!)  were not critically well received nor financially lucrative. The making of these extravaganzas, the decline of inner city movie houses, growth of suburban malls also contributed to the demise of the roadshow.

As we will see in the final article on Marvin, he had trouble not only getting back on top but starring in a decent movie.